The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

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Digamma-F-Wau: Mar 22, 2016; It is curious and wants to accept all kinds of challenges

Well after all these years I've finally gotten around to doing a Let's Play for the site. Since it's my first time I'll leave a sample of the OP and first update for people to give feedback on before I start the thread.

Test OP posted:

What is this game?
Super Lesbian Animal RPG is an indie rpg created by Bobby "ponett" Schroeder with music by Beatrix Quinn. Released late last year, this game's been in development for a long while.

Is that really what it's called?
It was a working title that stuck; the game may have exactly what it says on the tin, but it also has more to it than that. If you're hooked from the title alone then it's very likely that you'll enjoy this game, but if the title makes you think the game's gonna be shallow, don't worry, because it does go deeper than that.

Is this porn?
No. The dev estimates that it should probably be rated T for Teen.

How thorough is this Let's Play gonna be?
I'm going to do not just the full main story but also all the sidequests. I'm not gonna look at every single little interaction nor do every single npc conversation; nor am I gonna show both sides of branching dialogue paths; gotta leave some things for people who wanna play themselves. I will do all 3 of a set of mutually exclusive endgame sidequests though.

Where can I find this game to support the devs?
The game's official site with relevant links is here. It's available from both Steam and itch.io, while the OST can be gotten from Bandcamp. Now due to the limitations of the engine (RPG Maker VX Ace of Lisa: The Painful/Hylics 1 fame), it only works on Windows, with stuff like Wine or Proton needed to run on Mac/Linux. Amazingly thanks to the power of Proton it can actually run decently on Steam Deck with only a few minor issues.

How often are you gonna update?
This is my first Let's Play so I legitimately don't know what I'll be able to handle. I hope I'll be able to get out 1-3 updates per week but no promises.

SPOILER POLICY
Since this is a story driven game No Spoilers Are Allowed, not even under spoiler text.

Oh hey that reminds me: Fun Fact: The game was origina-
SsssssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I'll get to that in the LP itself

Prologue:
Part I: With the Blessings of the Star, the Course the Future Takes is Ours (test post of first update here)

Digamma-F-Wau fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Mar 18, 2023

# ? Mar 18, 2023 01:09

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 11:55

PurpleXVI: Oct 30, 2011; Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

The only thing I could suggest, and that might be a personal preference, is that for images that don't have any text or anything else between them, shove a full line break in between. I feel like it helps my brain separate things a bit better.

# ? Mar 18, 2023 01:12

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

In honor of the upcoming expansion for the Spirit Island board game I had it in my mind to do a Let's Play of the digital version. Unfortunately, I've run into a snag: the digital version's UI is unreadable dogshit, which isn't so much of an issue if you're experienced with the board game but is a problem for introducing it to new players. I can fiddle with better resampling & a little bit of sharpening and maybe squeeze out some incremental improvements but most of the jagginess is baked into the lovely UI. For example, the artifacting on these cards is 100% Handelabra:

I've tried to do what I can anyhow using text explanations to cover the gaps in the UI's readability, but I fear it's probably a lost cause. Is it at all possible to follow what's going on here?

# ? Mar 24, 2023 18:50

s__herzog: Sep 13, 2022

I think the sampling looks ok. The fonts are going to be hard to read, especially in zoomed-out screenshots, no getting around that, but your narration fills in the gaps quite well, and as you play through, readers will get familiar with the cards you're using and not need to read the text on screen as much.

Is it possible to play the game in a lower resolution that might force the text to get a little larger compared to everything else?

# ? Mar 25, 2023 03:11

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

I tried that and unfortunately there's no real discernible change, the supported resolution doesn't go down that low and it doesn't change the crappy scaling anyhow.

It occurs to me that I can at least fix the cards with a little legwork: you can zoom in on a power card and get a full resolution view that takes up the whole screen, which is what the game natively downscales to produce the crappy aliased card views. So if I get captures of the giant size cards I can resample them in a real image editor and paste them in manually where needed to produce a spread of readable cards. I don't think I could help the scrunched up card thumbnails but this way I could at least introduce cards in with their text and symbols un-mangled.

# ? Mar 25, 2023 05:05

Commander Keene: Dec 21, 2016; Faster than the others

Yeah, showing a native-res pic of a card when you first get it or when it's important to your strategy seems like a good idea.

# ? Mar 25, 2023 10:47

Fat Samurai: Feb 16, 2011; To go quickly is foolish. To go slowly is prudent. Not to go; that is wisdom.

If you have Tabletop Simulator, maybe that�s a better way to take screenshots of parts of the screen?

# ? Mar 25, 2023 15:06

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Fat Samurai posted:

If you have Tabletop Simulator, maybe that�s a better way to take screenshots of parts of the screen?

Hmm, yeah, that may be the way to go. I originally went for Handelabra because I'm lazy but if I'm going to be futzing about cutting and pasting screenshots together for readability then I probably might as well do it with TTS. It's been a while since I've done SI on TTS but it looks like the good mods these days do have some HUD elements for invader board state, which was the other advantage the Handelabra version had.

# ? Mar 25, 2023 18:59

the holy poopacy: May 16, 2009; hey! check this out; Fun Shoe

Ok, take two using Tabletop Simulator. Does this make the action any easier to follow? Text is still pretty small and fuzzy, but at least all the symbols are intact.

# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:00

PurpleXVI: Oct 30, 2011; Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

This looks pretty readable to me, a couple of the cards I had to squint at, but that was it.

# ? Mar 27, 2023 23:06

really queer Christmas: Apr 22, 2014

Hi, I've got a new type of LP I'm trying. I'm looking for some feedback - The United States Goon Fund: Let's Play Helping Goons put stairs in their home

_{drat, that's a cool avatar on the left!}

So it's kinda a fun game, but the story is actually pretty depressing, in that people are needing help and aid from people, especially in more dire economic times like the past few years have been to varying degrees and reasons. But thankfully, there's a potentially happy ending! And that happy ending requires this LP to have audience participation.

So how do I help participate?

That's easy! You can click the link above to be able to help be one of the "donators" if you want to roleplay as a goon with money wanting to help their fellow man in need of help with food, medicine, or keeping the lights on. Or, click the same link above but you choose to be one of the "requestors" or a goon who's in need of help and wants some help to get through a tough time. It's easy, and whichever you are right now, we are here if you ever become the opposite role!

Sounds great! Any limitations?

Unfortunately due to... uh, tax law (why an LP has to deal with tax law is beyond me) the Fund cannot let people from outside the USA belong to either group. But if you are still wanting to participate, please PM me and we'll try to do our best to coordinate something in case of an emergency!

So please help or get some help from goons like you - just wanting to post.

# ? Mar 28, 2023 03:54

PurpleXVI: Oct 30, 2011; Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

really queer Christmas posted:

Hi, I've got a new type of LP I'm trying. I'm looking for some feedback - The United States Goon Fund: Let's Play Helping Goons put stairs in their home

_{drat, that's a cool avatar on the left!}

So it's kinda a fun game, but the story is actually pretty depressing, in that people are needing help and aid from people, especially in more dire economic times like the past few years have been to varying degrees and reasons. But thankfully, there's a potentially happy ending! And that happy ending requires this LP to have audience participation.

So how do I help participate?

That's easy! You can click the link above to be able to help be one of the "donators" if you want to roleplay as a goon with money wanting to help their fellow man in need of help with food, medicine, or keeping the lights on. Or, click the same link above but you choose to be one of the "requestors" or a goon who's in need of help and wants some help to get through a tough time. It's easy, and whichever you are right now, we are here if you ever become the opposite role!

Sounds great! Any limitations?

Unfortunately due to... uh, tax law (why an LP has to deal with tax law is beyond me) the Fund cannot let people from outside the USA belong to either group. But if you are still wanting to participate, please PM me and we'll try to do our best to coordinate something in case of an emergency!

So please help or get some help from goons like you - just wanting to post.

I vote D: commit tax fraud and send the funds to a doomsday cult, I think that's what we really need to get the true ending.

# ? Mar 28, 2023 03:57

really queer Christmas: Apr 22, 2014

PurpleXVI posted:

I vote D: commit tax fraud and send the funds to a doomsday cult, I think that's what we really need to get the true ending.

this is the most goon ending tbf

# ? Mar 28, 2023 04:00

Sally: Jan 9, 2007; Don't post Small Dash!

For those who haven't checked the Happy B-Day thread:

Sally posted:

To celebrate the 16th b-day, SALP now has some new LP-specific tags:

From left-to-right: SSLP, VLP solo, VLP group, CYOA, and Hybrid LP tags!

All credit goes to vilkacis for making these literally years ago. The idea was that we might set up SALP to have a sub-tag function like what Ask/Tell and SA-Mart has. Apparently the radium code to do that is spaghetti and annoying to deal with... and critically, you wouldn't be able to sort thread-types by those tags, which kind of defeats the point. Rather than never use them though, I figured we'd get some mileage out of them here anyways.

# ? Mar 30, 2023 05:57

Hirayuki: Mar 28, 2010

That's very cool! :cheersbird:

# ? Mar 30, 2023 23:56

FeyerbrandX: Oct 9, 2012

I'm sure Cover Your Own rear end could see use in some other forum.

# ? Mar 31, 2023 09:12

DoubleNegative: Jan 27, 2010; The most virtuous child in the entire world.

Those tags are pretty cool. Good work vilkacis!

# ? Mar 31, 2023 11:09

vilkacis: Feb 16, 2011

Well poo poo :aaa:

I kinda forgot about those and figured everyone else did too. ~~A little sad you didn't use the vlp one that had the entire first level of Sonic in it though~~

_{also i think the other CYOA one someone else made is better}

# ? Mar 31, 2023 12:13

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

vilkacis posted:

Well poo poo

I kinda forgot about those and figured everyone else did too. ~~A little sad you didn't use the vlp one that had the entire first level of Sonic in it though~~

_{also i think the other CYOA one someone else made is better}

Just picturing astrals face when you try to upload a five meg thread tag lol

# ? Mar 31, 2023 12:31

vilkacis: Feb 16, 2011

sebmojo posted:

Just picturing astrals face when you try to upload a five meg thread tag lol

Unfortunately, it was only 65kb.

# ? Mar 31, 2023 13:13

Rocket Baby Dolls: Mar 3, 2006; Normally I don't make aesthetic criticisms in other peoples' homes, but that rug looks like a beaver exploded. If meat is murder, then that rug is at least a severe beating.

vilkacis posted:

Unfortunately, it was only 65kb.

# ? Mar 31, 2023 13:17

Left 4 Bread: Oct 4, 2021; i sleep

vilkacis posted:

Unfortunately, it was only 65kb.

# ? Mar 31, 2023 13:47

Geemer: Nov 4, 2010

vilkacis posted:

Unfortunately, it was only 65kb.

Is it too late to change to this one?

# ? Mar 31, 2023 15:28

Sally: Jan 9, 2007; Don't post Small Dash!

Geemer posted:

Is it too late to change to this one?

Seb? Seb!?!??

# ? Mar 31, 2023 15:40

Technowolf: Nov 4, 2009

vilkacis posted:

Unfortunately, it was only 65kb.

You, sir/madam/[insert appropriate appelation here], are a genius. Possibly a mad one, but a genius nonetheless.

# ? Mar 31, 2023 18:49

Sally: Jan 9, 2007; Don't post Small Dash!

sebmojo posted:

Just picturing astrals face when you try to upload a five meg thread tag lol

But seriously, do you think we could get the 65kb one uploaded? I kind of like the blank ones aesthetic-wise, especially the three talking heads to represent a group VLP...

but... maybe add this one too?

Seb?

Seb?

# ? Mar 31, 2023 19:16

IGgy IGsen: Apr 11, 2013; "If I lose I will set myself on fire."

Sally posted:

But seriously, do you think we could get the 65kb one uploaded? I kind of like the blank ones aesthetic-wise, especially the three talking heads to represent a group VLP...

but... maybe add this one too?

Seb?

Seb?

it should be uploaded but we permaban everyone who uses it for a thread that isn't a Sonic LP.

# ? Mar 31, 2023 23:42

vilkacis: Feb 16, 2011

Sally posted:

especially the three talking heads to represent a group VLP...

I did make a group version too :v:

~~On reflection i should probably have put the second level in that one, just for variety.~~ e:

(In all seriousness though don't feel like you have to use these, they're pretty silly and i feel the possible uses are probably pretty limited anyway.)

vilkacis fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Apr 1, 2023

# ? Apr 1, 2023 07:30

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

Odd Wilson posted:

# ? Apr 1, 2023 11:23

Sally: Jan 9, 2007; Don't post Small Dash!

seb!?!?!?!??! can we do this?

# ? Apr 1, 2023 15:30

Kheldarn: Feb 17, 2011

I think Seb should only do it if Sally agrees to stay a mod for 4 more years

# ? Apr 1, 2023 17:57

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

Sally posted:

seb!?!?!?!??! can we do this?

i'll check with astral but should be fine!

# ? Apr 1, 2023 22:38

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

Kheldarn posted:

I think Seb should only do it if Sally agrees to stay a mod for 4 more years

All is good I'll upload it later today.

# ? Apr 2, 2023 00:18

Geemer: Nov 4, 2010

Awesome! Thanks to the admins for their great service and to Sally for their great sacrifice.

# ? Apr 2, 2023 00:32

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

so just to be clear, do you want the one with one talking head or two? i like the double header better personally.

# ? Apr 2, 2023 04:41

IGgy IGsen: Apr 11, 2013; "If I lose I will set myself on fire."

Why not both

# ? Apr 2, 2023 04:53

Quackles: Aug 11, 2018; Pixels of Light.

I vote for two heads, if we can only pick one.

# ? Apr 2, 2023 04:56

sebmojo: Oct 23, 2010; Legit Cyberpunk

Quackles posted:

I vote for two heads, if we can only pick one.

eh, actually why not. do you want me to remove the sad no-sonic versions and put in potently sonicized ones for both? (double head sonichu is live now)

# ? Apr 2, 2023 05:16

FPzero: Oct 20, 2008; Game Over
Return of Mido

I have no clue if we want these but I made these tags for the Retro Games subforum when it opened but they never got added:

# ? Apr 2, 2023 15:28

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 11:55

Sally: Jan 9, 2007; Don't post Small Dash!

seb

i leave the choice of new tags to the Sandcastle. SALP, you must choose!

# ? Apr 2, 2023 22:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

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